Write It Well

The longer a sentence gets, the more difficult it is to group its ideas clearly. But even average-length sentences can be unnecessarily tangled, as in this example:

As investors clamored for shares, Groupon, at the end of the day, priced its initial public offering at $20, above the expected range of $16 to $18.

That sentence is 27 words long — a good length in business prose. But the sentence is hard to follow because several ideas are mixed together:

• Investors clamored for shares at the end of the day
• Groupon priced its initial public offering at $20
• That price was above the expected range of $16 to $18

Separating those three ideas makes it easier to weld them back together with new, user-friendly transitions:

As investors clamored for shares at the end of the day, Groupon priced its initial public offering at $20 — above the expected range of $16 to $18.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Have you ever felt drained just looking at an e-mail that was one long, unbroken paragraph of text? A long sentence can have the same intimidating effect. Here’s an example about the short battery life of the iPhone 4S:

For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue – a spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment – in what has become a typical pattern of silence for the company after customers begin complaining about a technical problem with a new iPhone.

The sentence is 42 words long; we recommend that you keep most sentences in business documents under about 25 words. Breaking up the sentence into separate ideas can help you rewrite it:

• For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue
• A spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment
• This has become a typical pattern of silence for the company
• Customers have complained before about a technical problem with a new iPhone

This separation of ideas makes it much easier to create two or more shorter sentences with new transitions between the ideas:

For now, Apple isn’t saying anything about the issue; a spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. This has become a typical pattern of silence for the company when customers complain about a technical problem with a new iPhone.

Busy readers appreciate having a clear path marked out for them, and these 18- and 22-word sentences are much easier to follow.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on sentence structure and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Repeating the same part of speech can help busy readers understand you faster. This list of adjectives by David Pogue is a breeze to read:

Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent.

This list of nouns is almost as easy to follow:

Each [tile] represents something you’ve put there for easy access: an app, a speed-dial entry, a Web page, a music playlist or an e-mail folder.

And these verbs hand readers an easy series of actions:

[The phone is] great at understanding its Big Four commands: Call, Text, Find (on the Web) and Open (an app).

Breakdowns in parallel verb structure are the bane of many business writers (e.g., “I should do four things: call Kim, text Joe, finding my wallet, and open an account”).

It’s necessary to keep verbs in the same tense (“call Kim, text Joe, find my wallet, and open an account”) to help readers zip through your prose.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes chapters on verbs and sentence structure. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Busy readers appreciate it when they can follow your meaning quickly. Some words automatically build suspense; if you don’t use them carefully, they can make your sentences frustrating to read.

Four words that build suspense when they start a sentence are “Although …,” “Despite …,” “Unless ….,” and “While ….” These words usually delay the appearance of the sentence subject — a delay that can frustrate readers.

Here’s an example of a short, well-paced sentence that starts with the suspense-building word “Because”:

Because Amazon is also a retailer and sells an enormous quantity of books, it has a lot more information and access to readers.

Because the sentence is short, a reader gets to the underlined sentence subject quickly. That helps the reader grasp the point and move on.

But a busy reader might get annoyed with the suspenseful buildup behind the word “Because …” if more words came between it and the subject:

Because Amazon is also a retailer, sells an enormous quantity of books, and can give its authors a bigger and more targeted soapbox, it has a lot more information and access to readers.

Keep your sentences short any time you start them with suspense-building words. Or just rearrange your sentences so the subjects come first:

Amazon has a lot more information and access to readers because it is also a retailer, sells an enormous quantity of books, and can give its authors a bigger and more targeted soapbox.

Busy readers will appreciate your getting to the point right away.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes an entire chapter on sentence structure. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Business writers sometimes need to define specific words — especially when an everyday word refers to our products or services. (E.g., “The word tweet refers to a single Twitter post.”)

The following newspaper sentence is about small businesses; it uses quotation marks to highlight a word the writer is defining:

Even if you define “small” as fewer than 500 people … you still find that half the [US] work force is employed by large businesses.

Without the quotes, readers could feel confused:

Even if you define small as fewer than 500 people … you still find that half the [US] work force is employed by large businesses.

Italics also give a heads-up that a writer is exploring what a term means:

Even if you define small as fewer than 500 people … you still find that half the [US] work force is employed by large businesses.

Since some Web programs can’t set text in italics, most online journalists still use quotation marks to highlight these defined terms. For a more polished look, we recommend italics rather than quotes when you type a word that you then define. •

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on commonly confused words and two chapters on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Short sentences tend to be easier for writers to punctuate correctly and easier for busy readers to follow.

Here’s a sentence that’s correctly punctuated but could still slow readers down because it’s 46 words long:

Last year, the Olive Center released a surprising study, based on laboratory and sensory testing, that found that 69 percent of imported extra-virgin olive oils — including big brands like Bertolli, Filippo Berio and Carapelli — bought off the shelves of California supermarkets failed to meet international standards.

You don’t need to keep a careful eye on wandering verb phrases and nonessential clauses when you limit each sentence to two or three ideas:

Last year, the Olive Center released a surprising study based on laboratory and sensory testing. Researchers found that 69 percent of imported extra-virgin olive oils bought off the shelves of California supermarkets failed to meet international standards. Big brands like Bertolli, Filippo Berio and Carapelli were included in the study.

Those three sentences boil down to 15, 22, and 13 words long. We recommend that you keep most sentences in business documents under 25 words.

When your sentences feel convoluted, try cutting them down to size with more periods, stricter word counts, and just a few ideas each.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on sentence mechanics and two more on punctuation. We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Take a look at how active language frees up space in this pair of sentences:

BzzAgent was hired by Black Box last fall … to “increase awareness … and impact sales.”

Black Box hired BzzAgent last fall … to “increase awareness … and impact sales.”

Black Box is a company that sells boxed wine. The first sentence downplays the company through the passive voice, and the second sentence spotlights it with the active voice.

Passive verbs clutter up the first sentence with two unnecessary words: “BzzAgent was hired by Black Box.”

It’s faster and simpler to use active language and discard these unnecessary words: “Black Box hired BzzAgent.”

Concise writing helps you keep readers’ attention, and busy readers appreciate focused sentences.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes one chapter on sentence mechanics and another on verbs. You’ll learn how to write for maximum impact in all your business documents.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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The following sentence about Apple computers very elegantly demonstrates how dashes set off information in a sentence:

How did he take a commodity — to borrow from the novelist Tom Wolfe, the “veal gray” plastic boxes that once weighed so heavily on both our desks and spirits — and turn it into one of the most iconic and desirable objects on the planet?

— business analyst James B. Stewart, “How Steve Jobs Infused Passion into a Commodity,” nytimes.com, October 7, 2011

The core of the sentence amounts to, “How did he take a commodity and turn it into an iconic, desirable object?” The dashes surround and emphasize a quote that explains why that transformation was remarkable.

We’ve written before about the uses of dashes. When you master the basics of grammar and punctuation, you can design your own sentences to deliver the precise meanings you need your readers to grasp.

Studying the basic mechanics of the sentence is one of the most effective ways to craft prose that will inspire your clients and customers.

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Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation and another on sentence mechanics. You’ll learn how to write for maximum clarity and impact in all your business documents.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

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Very few business writers know the basic guidelines for when you do and don’t type a hyphen. Your writing can create an especially careful and polished impression when you grasp these three guidelines:

1. Don’t add a hyphen after most prefixes.
2. Don’t type a hyphen after a word that ends with -ly.
3. Do add a hyphen when most two-word descriptions come before a noun.

First, leave out a hyphen after a prefix in most words – e.g., preapproved or unplanned. But feel free to add a hyphen when the same letter is repeated – e.g., pre-existing or un-newsworthy.

Webster’s dictionary only includes hyphens after prefixes when a word would be unclear without it. (E.g., co-op is a two-syllable noun for a kind of apartment, while coop is a one-syllable noun for a chicken cage).

Second, never add hyphens after words that end with -ly (e.g., it’s incorrect to type the hyphen in “clearly-written report”).

And for other words, do add a hyphen to a two-word description that comes before a noun (“It’s a well-written report“) but leave out the hyphen when the same description follows the noun (“The report is well written”).

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes two chapters on punctuation to help you boost the impact of all your business documents.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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Three of the verb forms in this sentence are a great illustration of how the passive voice can be the best fit for a sentence:

Shucked oysters packed in their liquor will keep up to a week if kept quite cold.

Here’s the same sentence recast in the active voice:

If you shuck oysters and pack them in their liquor, they will keep up to a week if you keep them quite cold.

The passive voice usually streamlines a sentence by making it clear who does what. But in this case, the active voice makes the sentence longer with the unnecessary pronouns you, they, and them.

When you’re deciding whether to use the active or passive voice, just ask yourself if it matters who takes an action, and decide which option delivers your meaning more easily.

If you ran an oyster bar and retail outlet, you’d probably prefer the first sentence.

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Do you have an important document but not enough time to clarify your thoughts and double-check your punctuation and grammar? Just use Write It Well’s editing services to make sure your readers follow your ideas and respect your voice.

Write It Well’s book Essential Grammar includes a chapter on verbs to help you boost the impact of all your business documents.

We’ve made all the book’s exercises available as a free download here to accompany the e-book, which is now available on Amazon.com!

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